Showing posts with label monte carlo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monte carlo. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Kaggling Dark Halos

Success! I scored higher than Lenstool!

This was one of those Kaggle competitions that I had no right to compete in. My goal was to beat the benchmark, which was a state of the art program in 2007. I will be the first to admit this wasn't the most ambitious goal. However, the closest I have ever been to an astronomy class was an episode of The Magic School Bus - it was the one where they explored all nine planets. Though my best method ranked 121 out of 357, I still consider it a victory (Lenstool ranked 201 out of 357.) My victory definitely exemplifies how childish logic can be successfully used in place of cosmological knowledge.